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Comment by Zekio | Hacker News Reader

+1 to google for sending a guy to pick up a defective unit at 9pm on a Friday, gotta say that is dedication

Google deserves absolutely no kudos for this. Their customer service is well-known for being a nigh-impenetrable monolithic black box, the only reason this got taken care of so quickly and personally is because they want to avoid negative press of the Home being a literal surveillance box. If you have a problem that won't hurt their PR, good luck getting any assistance from them.

I'm highly critical of Google in general, but this is indeed an amazing response from them, and is above and beyond what I'd expect from any tech company.

Though, I have to wonder if the response was so urgent because the author is a journalist who specifically writes about Google products (which he indicated to them right away). They really had no choice but to respond immediately.

Seems like this may have been less out of concern of bad press and more because of the author's agency as a journalist. I'd imagine a most bug reports have trouble standing out from the "noise" surrounding Google's day-to-day operations, but the author can make their request a little "louder" so Google noticed. Probably helps too that it sounds like the population of people with the home minis is currently pretty small (only attendees of the release event).

You'd think we'd have some sort of baseline for an "acceptable" number of queries. Alarm bells should probably go off if a home thinks people are talking to it 24/7.

Disclaimer: I work at Google and don't actually have any idea how any of this works.

Yes, this is what happens if you are well known blogger with a large following and happen to have private contacts within Google's marketing department.

The average user will not get anything remotely like this response, and it's dangerous to hold this up as a positive representation of Google's support - their support was never even involved.

They were already parked across the street in a windowless van so it wasn't really that dedicated.

"I iz here frum da Google tu replace unit, yes?"

I guess mentioning you work on a story and publish in a day will make a difference.

Dedication ? They were just afraid of really bad PR that could (will) result from this.

This issue should be caught earlier. Instead of pushing people to work on Friday evening, give them more time to test the crap out of the stuff that you want to release.

I think the Google engineer that, years ago, missed a flight connection to write a MapReduce from the airport that restored corrupted data is perhaps a step or two beyond...

That sounds interesting but from searching around I can't find anything about that, do you have a link?

It was a decade or more ago; I'm not sure there are links out there. Although legendary internally, there's at least one more recent and more epic MapReduce-based story. In order to fully understand it, though, you'd need to reveal details about search infrastructure.

Meanwhile, A2DP on Android is still broken ...

(Just a random issue on Google's support forum that has been open for ages)

Not only that, but also diagnosing the problem on Saturday and Sunday. Kudos to the Google Home team.

On the other hand, "if you're not here on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday." When did this become admirable again?

It should be admirable, precisely because it should be exceptional.

Sometimes it really does hit the fan, and sometimes it really does need to be now. That is the nature of the industry. We just need to make sure it’s remarkable for the right reasons.

The question is whether whoever did the work got weekend overtime pay.

At Google, you get extra pay for off-hours oncall.

At OT rates I trust and a payment for being on call

No, certainly not. Most of my off-hours oncall shifts look like me sleeping while nothing is happening. But it is a nice bonus that I'd prefer not to give up.

These days I accept nothing less than full time pay for on-call status, even if that looks like me sleeping while nothing is happening. Of course, that means I almost never get asked to provide on-call service, but if a company is exerting some control over my time, they're going to pay full value for that. It's not about what I'm doing, it's about what I'm not able to do. I can't travel, I can't drink excessively, I can't ignore my phone or put it on do not disturb, I can't be too far away from an internet connection, etc.

And those things deserve compensation. Full time pay? I mean everything is negotiable but that one is a hard sell.

Yes having a payment for being on call say £500 for 1 in 4 but expecting fulltime pay while you on call is just silly

Price is just the intersection of supply vs demand. You arbitrarily choosing £500 is no more or less silly than me choosing 1x base rate or even 10x base rate. It just sounds like you're more willing to let work intrude on your private time than I am. Neither of us is silly for that.

There's negotiation and asking for the moon on a stick - you just get laughed at.

I guess that's a matter of perspective. I'm not trying to sell it. In fact, quite the opposite.

There are several different tiers based on the SLO of the oncall, usually measured in something like minutes to a keyboard after a page.

The compensation varies based on the tier.

Even in Germany, and Scandinavia – with our extreme employee protection laws – in such emergencies, employees are allowed to work during the night, on a weekend (just for double pay).

These are exceptional examples, but completely normal, and acceptable.

"We are working on a story and will publish in the next day or so," makes a lot of people get up at 3am

ask them why your adsense got cut off and see the response time.

Special support for special people makes me want to use their surveillance devices even less.

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